TinyMe 2008

About a year ago we reviewed TinyMe when it was still in its beta and test stage. But a lot has happened in the past year, and all of it good. But what makes it so good? Well, in addition to fixing all the bugs and little quirks, TinyMe has become more stable and loads faster than it was in the early days.For those who are unaware of this distro, TinyMe is a slimmed down, streamlined version of PcLinuxOS, otherwise affectionately referred to as PCLOS. The biggest difference between PCLOS and TinyMe is that while the former is more tailored toward modern hardware, while the latter is better suited to to older and slower computers. Plus - TinyMe is also useful for people who have modern hardware, but want to have a system that is as screamingly fast and lean as possible. And that's exactly what TinyMe is.The install disk weights in at a lightweight 199mb. This includes both the full installer, and a complete and fairly well featured livecd component. When first booting the cd, you're given the TinyMe boot splash screen, and the now-familiar list of livecd, various safe modes, console, mediacheck, and memtest. (This distro also includes a "copy2ram" option, which not all do. If you have the memory to do this, I'd definitely recommend it. You haven't lived until you've run a linux distro entirely from RAM.) The system loads from the boot menu into the full desktop in a blazing 30 seconds. (Ok, 30 seconds doesn't sound fast, but when you're talking about livecd boot times, that's screaming.)Once you're done booting there's a simple screen that asks you about your keyboard, and after that the login screen. The login screen comes with two logins, "guest" and "root," that you can choose from. The login info is even conveniently displayed on the screen for you, so there is no scrabbling through README files or documentation to get in. Once you login, it almost immediately drops you on the desktop! If you've logged in as "guest," you get a little popup menu asking if you want to setup your system options. (This menu is bypassed if you login as "root," which is a bit curious, but I guess that's ok.)Once you close that, wandering around the desktop is fairly quick and easy, as the system is powered by the OpenBox window manager. This is a streamlined and ultra sleek Window manager that keeps things fast and simple. The desktop is populated by a group of icons that are ordered in a way reminiscent of Puppy, in the angled corner style. In fact, speaking of Puppy, a few of the utilities (such as Grafburn) have been ported over from puppy to TinyMe since they're so lightweight and yet powerful.One of the unique features of TinyMe is that it contains the TinyCC, a minimalistic control center, in addition to the fully featured PCLOS control center. It also includes GnomePPP for dialup, Audacious for music, MTPaint for drawing, Abiword for writing and more. There's even a couple of games to keep you entertained. The system also uses the Synaptic Package Manager for installing new ports which makes life so easy. Another interesting thing is that the livecd has Conky running on the desktop. For those unfamiliar with it, Conky is a real time system monitor for your PC. It tells you how much of each of the important elements of your PC (ram, swap, cpu, etc) are being used. If you don't like it, it's easy enough to remove with a little config file edit, not a big deal at all. The help files can walk you through that if you ever need to do it.TinyMe uses the PCLOS Draklive system installer to install TinyMe onto your drive. For the most part it's everything you would expect Draklive to be, but with a few minor twists just for TinyMe, such as the ability to install to a pen drive. The install to the system is very quick and easy, and only took a couple of minutes start to finish.Once you've installed the system and rebooted, everything you found in the livecd is present in the live system, save for two icons on your desktop, one for the help files, and one for the installer. The moving of the help files is not a big thing since those are still there, just in a different place. The system really does a splendid job of being a full featured workstation distribution while being as lean and trim as possible. It detected all of my hardware and set it up properly with zero issues, and no post-setup tweaks needed at all.While there are no video player applications installed with the system, installing one is pretty easy through Synaptic. One bump I found: TinyMe doesn't autodetect dvd's and cd's like I'd like it to. But the media players all seem to see them alright, so that's something I can overlook. One thing of personal preference I'd rather see in this system is the default use of Firefox as the browser rather than Opera. There's nothing inherently wrong with Opera, except that for purists, it's not truly open source (nor is it quite as good as Firefox).But other than that and the few other tiny quirks I mentioned before, I really have nothing bad to say about TinyMe 2008. It's a great OS: lean, clean, responsive and ready for newbie and experienced user alike. So if you haven't had a chance to check it out, I recommend downloading it. You can get it here.